Walter Koenig, who has died at the age of 90, spent the better part of a lifetime proving that the universe is large enough for one man to be both the boyish navigator who never quite mastered the accent and the telepathic bureaucrat who could make a space station feel like a police state with a single raised eyebrow.
As Ensign Pavel Chekov on Star Trek: The Original Series, Koenig arrived in the second season like a mop-topped afterthought designed to appease the Russians and the teenagers in equal measure. The accent wandered about the steppes of Central Casting with the confidence of a tourist who has misread the map. Yet there was something disarming in the performance: a young man forever slightly out of his depth, forever ready with a line about inventing something that had clearly been invented elsewhere. He sat at the helm of the Enterprise for three seasons and seven films, ageing only slightly faster than the special effects, and somehow turned a secondary role into a permanent fixture of popular memory. One half-expected him, in later years, to claim that the warp drive itself had been a Soviet innovation.
Then came Babylon 5, and the joke turned sharper. As Alfred Bester of the Psi Corps, Koenig shed the wide-eyed ensign like an old uniform and stepped into the role of a man who could smile while rearranging your thoughts. Twelve episodes across five seasons, and each appearance tightened the screws. Where Chekov had been the eager subordinate, Bester was the superior who never needed to raise his voice. Koenig played him with a quiet, almost bureaucratic menace, as if the real threat to free will was not some alien armada but a civil servant with a clipboard and the ability to read your mind. Fans who had grown up watching him plot courses through asteroid belts now found themselves rooting, against their better judgement, for the man who plotted courses through other people’s heads.
It was, in its way, a perfect career arc: from the navigator who always looked slightly surprised by the stars to the telepath who was never surprised by anything. Koenig understood the joke and, more importantly, never spoiled it by explaining the punchline. In an industry that prefers its actors to stay in one orbit, he simply changed ships and kept flying. The final frontier, it turned out, was range.